Customer Service: Clients May Not Really Care About Industry Standards
Many of us tend look to industry standards when we want to improve a process to enhance the client experience when it may be of little to no value to most clients.
An example of a typical industry standard is the way we traditionally measure Service Levels in contact centres. Service Level is typically a metric of answering X percentage of calls within X seconds. This is deemed as an important indicator of service delivery and it has been in place for years. When contact centres evaluate the client experience from an organizational perspective this metric is an important part as it is a measure of how fast the majority of phone calls are answered and the performance of the call centre. What this measure doesn’t truly indicate is the clients’ expectations and what is most important to them.
Another example of an industry standard is Quality Monitoring (QM). This is a process of where calls are listened to, evaluated and scored. In some organizations we tend to spend too much time developing the process from the QM evaluation form to the scoring method and how calls are selected. All of this to ensure we are delivering the best experience to the client.
In our organization we have Calibration Session on the client experience. The intention of these sessions is to align on what a great client experience should sound like. We do this by listening to customer compliments; what we found out is the standard we had for a “wow” call and what the client thought was a “wow” call were not aligned. The truth of the matter is the clients’ expectations were much lower than ours. In these calls our Associates were friendly, efficient and helped resolve the client’s inquiry on the call. Our opinion was the calls were “average” as we expected the Associates to be super-friendly and ask a few more questions on the clients’ implied needs.
So here we are internally focusing on what we thought the client expected, when in fact the clients expectations were clearly lower than our own.
What this caused us to do was simplify our Calibration Sessions to be focused on the overall experience of the client, instead of meticulously evaluating each nuance of the interaction and scoring the call. Having said this, we have not changed our expectations on the client experience. We still expect our staff to be super-friendly, ask the right questions and completely resolve the client issue.
What we learned from this is it is critical to determine what is important to our clients before building, investing time and resources in a process that is not an important factor of the service experience for our clients. Industry standards are great as a guideline. What is more important is to truly understand the needs and priorities of your clients.
By David Bradshaw, Vice President (Head) of Sales & Service, ING DIRECT. David is a member of CMA’s Contact Centre Council.
